Summer to my Winter
by Cyn V
Summary: Minato, a lonely vampire, takes Naruto, his lonely descendant, under his wing. - AU one-shot!


**Disclaimer: _Naruto_ (c) Kishimoto and probably some other Japanese companies whose names I don't know.  
A/N: I realise this works better as the premise to something more, but I will probably never write that something more, so this is it.  
**

* * *

**The Summer to my Winter**

He was the summer to my winter, that small boy. So bright he was, all blond hair, wide crystal-blue eyes and shining, shining smile. So innocent and helpless that I often wondered what place could such a frail being have in this cruel life. I soon realised that I had my understanding of the world all backwards, though, after I took him under my wing. He taught me about real strength and he taught me that being hundreds of years old does not make you wise. I am Minato Namikaze and he was Naruto. Just Naruto.

I am immortal, but I was not always like this. Once, I was just another man. I was born in a time where there was no electricity and people lived in settlements too small to be called villages. If they wanted to travel, they did it on foot and they had better know how to find their way because there were no roads. The world was a wider place then. Travelling was a perilous thing. No one would embark on such a journey unless they had a very good reason that justified the risk of being robbed and killed by the many thieves hiding in the wilds. Demons roamed the land and it was not unusual for neighbours to warn each other about sightings of creatures who are very real but have since been relegated to myth.

I was married at a young age to a woman I barely knew who lived two houses down from me. Our parents made all the arrangements, but neither of us minded. There were no foolish notions of romance as there are today. We married when I was seventeen years old after meeting only twice. We had all the time in the world to get to know each other after that.

My fiery Kushina. It has been a long time since she passed, but sometimes I miss having her by my side. She was younger than me, but she always knew what do to in any given situation and she always had an answer at the tip of her tongue. Where words failed her, her fists were eloquent enough. I miss her confidence, her self-assuredness. I miss her.

She died giving birth to our only son two years later. The doctors told us that the baby's position inside her womb was off and that we had to choose between one or the other. She did not hesitate, unlike me. I cried throughout the whole two hours of labour after that and did not stop until two weeks later, when I ran out of energy to keep crying and take care of a baby that kept me up at all hours of night at the same time. I raised my son as best I could. I know I did not do poorly, just as I know that Kushina would have done it better.

It was by the time that my son was five that my life changed forever. I do not remember why anymore, but I left the settlement on a trip for some reason. I have already told you about the dangers of the road and the creatures that roamed the land in the cover of darkness. As I was returning home, I was jumped by four men. I would describe them, but it happened so fast that I could not take notice of much besides the fact that their faces were smudged with many layers of dirt over overgrown beard. They took everything I had on me, from my supplies to my sandals, and beat me until I lost consciousness.

When I awoke, I could barely move. I had nothing on me but my pants and I had no idea where I was. The sun was going down and the forest around me was thick and unfamiliar. The wind carried with it the sound of howling and snarling and I realised that if I stayed where I was, my son would soon find himself an orphan. My decision made for me, I forced myself to run and look for a shelter. I deemed myself lucky to find a cave in a granite formation jutting upwards from the ground. At once, I knew there was something wrong about the eerie atmosphere inside and turned around, but by then it was too late. Something, one of those creatures no one believes exists anymore, had sneaked up behind me. It grabbed me and its teeth pierced the skin at my throat. My blood burned. For the second time that day, I passed out.

I never expected that I would wake again, but perhaps you could say that I never did, not really. Perhaps something else was born that night and it merely inhabited the dead body of that unfortunate traveller I had been, because I have never felt quite like myself since. My skin feels dead over my flesh and, whenever I move, it always feels like someone else is commanding the muscles. Perhaps my old self is still somewhere inside me, enslaved and forced to follow the will of this creature that took over his body. What I do know is that I was extremely disoriented when I regained conscience. It felt like I was experiencing the world through someone else's eyes and ears and nothing quite made sense. It took some time for me to remember that I had a home that I was supposed to return to and a son who was waiting for me. When I did get there, I found the settlement in an uproar and all the neighbours worried. I had been missing for almost three weeks.

Life regained a measure of normalcy after that. I still felt unlike myself but I tried not to let it affect me. I focused on working the fields for crops along with the rest of the men. I was still getting over the fact that I had almost died, I kept telling myself. After years of telling myself this, I started to doubt that the truth was really that simple.

I kept noticing small things. My nails grew at a slower pace than they used to and my hair did not need to be trimmed as often. I could go on for days without sleep. In fact, every day, as soon as the sun set, I felt energised. I lost interest in food and no amount of drinking affected my judgement. The good part was that I could get a lot more work done in the fields, so I soon gained the favour of the neighbours for sharing my plentiful crops. I became worried, though, when I looked at myself in the mirror one day, ten years after the incident with the thieves, and realised that I had not changed a thing. I had not gained a single wrinkle, whereas the fellows I worked with had aged considerably from working in the merciless sun as we did.

It was also around this time that talk around the settlement started to focus on the news about missing people in the surrounding territories. Travellers were being found with their throats ripped open, so many of the men were trying to organise a hunting party. They suspected wolves. I never joined those discussions, keeping instead to the side with one hand around the scar in my neck. I did my best not to listen.

My son continued to grow into a fine young man and, when he turned seventeen, I found him a wife. For some time after the marriage, she came to live with us, while my son built a house for them to start a life in. Life was good then. I had forgotten how nice it was to have a woman around the house and my new daughter was very kind. I wished them all the best when they moved out and asked them to visit often.

I suddenly found myself all alone, with nothing but tedious farm work to distract me from the thoughts that I did not wish to have. What had happened to me on that cave? What was still happening to me now?

My answers came in the form of an old man with long, untamed grey hair and tattered clothes. He came knocking on my door in the middle of the night with all the desperation of a mad man. He begged me for shelter and I could not refuse him. I offered him my son's bed to sleep in. Come morning, he looked even worse than I remembered. There was a smell about him of unwashed waste and sweat that I had not noticed the previous night. His hair was full of snarls and his full eyebrows hid a dangerous glint in his black eyes.

I asked him who he was and why he had been out in the middle of the night. His answers were curt and designed to give the appearance of maintaining a conversation while telling me nothing. I did not persist. He asked me if he could stay another night and I saw no harm in that. The mystery of who he was would keep my mind busy and if he were any unnatural creature, surely the magic wards inscribed around the settlement would not have let him through. While I worked the fields that day, I came up with a dozen different ways to get information out of him, all of which failed when I met him again to share a brief dinner. As we retired to sleep, I bade him goodnight with a sense of disappointment.

That happened to be one of the rare nights I managed to fall asleep, but I did not get the chance to rest. I woke after barely an hour's sleep to a weight on my chest: the old man was on top of me, holding me down, and in his snarling open mouth were two canines larger than any I had ever seen on a wolf. He bit down on my neck. It was a strange experience, because I felt the blood spilling from the wound down to my bare chest, but no pain. My fear faded, as did the madness that had apparently overcome my guest. He let go of me and looked at me strangely.

He said, "you're one of us," in a genuinely surprised whisper and that was when I knew that I had to stop lying to myself, telling myself that I was still just another man. I asked him what we were. "Vampires," he said.

There was no thunder strike to accompany the revelation, no great shifting of the world. It simply made sense, like somehow I had always known it. Again, life was different back then. Every one knew that vampires were real. Not like today. These days, I would earn myself a one-way trip to the crazy house if I went about saying that vampires are real. And just as I knew that what that old man was telling me was true, so did I know what my life would be like from that point on. I had to disappear before people in the small community noticed that I was different.

I asked the man to leave the next day. I had no desire to be with someone who had attacked me in the middle of the night after I had done them a kindness. Fortunately, my neck was completely healed by morning. He did not object and I have never seen him since. I put all my affairs in order and paid my son one last visit at his house. His wife was already expecting a child. Then I told them that I was leaving for a trip to a neighbouring village. After that, it was just a matter of disappearing. Everyone assumed me dead when I did not return.

I spent most of my time alone after that. I travelled and I learned all there was to know about the world. After I learned to read, a new world opened up before me and I learned about that one too. I was very curious about the new sciences, mathematics and physics and the manipulation of one's chakra. Electricity was invented and it revolutionised everything. Villages were growing.

Generations passed by me in a blur. Sometimes I went back to my home village. I saw my son grow old and die. I saw his daughter grow old and her son's sons grow old. It was something of a comfort to know that I had descendants. I never introduced myself to them, but just knowing that they existed and that they were doing well was enough to calm the madness that sometimes preyed upon my mind. I was very lonely.

Villages were starting to come together. They saw strength in numbers and they were becoming very efficient at defending themselves from the dangers of the world. They now had ways to detect vampires that actually worked and good enough weapons that their hunters were no longer the motley assortments of scared villagers of before. Large families were forming military clans who trained their children properly in the arts of battle. These clans were not dedicated exclusively to hunting creatures like me, but they were very capable at it nonetheless. It was the start of the age of the ninja.

Peaceful times soon came to an end. As each village gained more power, their leaders started craving even more of it. They became greedy and started hiring these clans, these ninja clans, to fight for them and conquer more lands to annex to their village. I think that was when people started forgetting that vampires were real. Why should they worry about supernatural creatures when they had the threat of war brought on by very ordinary humans? The only supernatural creatures they did not forget about were the ones they simply could not ignore: the tailed beasts.

I watched the rise of the ninja from a distance. I watched them tame the tailed beasts and bring down three great wars upon the world. Somewhere along the way, my descendants joined one of the larger military villages, Leaf village, and started training as ninja themselves. I kept a greater distance from them then, until I watched my many times over grandson sacrifice himself to the Death God to save his village. He left behind a newborn baby without any family.

I would have continued to keep my distance, had I not realised the treatment that the small boy received everywhere he went. The biting hate the people reserved for him shocked me. He was an incorrigible prankster, but I could read in his eyes that he just wanted someone to acknowledge his existence. If people were upset with him, then that meant they noticed him, and that was all he wanted. To be seen.

This cold body that had never felt like my own was suddenly betraying me. It forced me to do something. It broke my heart, my cold non-beating heart, to see my descendant, little Naruto, all alone like that.

I approached him discreetly and he was thrilled when I told him that I would take care of him and be his family. It was a good thing that he was so young and trusting, because otherwise he might not have been as willing to believe me. Soon after, we left the village, even more discreetly. Within months, I was calling him son. Within a year, he was calling me father. He told me he wanted to be a ninja and I taught him everything I knew. When he told me he wanted to return to the Leaf village to become its Hokage, however, I resisted. I did not want to lose him, my precious tether to the present world that he was. He promised he would never forget me, though, so I let him go. And the rest... the rest is history.


End file.
